Gamze Z. Dane

Gamze Dane is currently a tenured Assistant Professor at the Department of Built Environment of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). She is also the Principal Investigator of the Digital City Program of Urban Development Initiative (UDI) since September 2020. Gamze has a strong interdisciplinary background with a Ph.D. in “Urban Planning” and a MSc. in “Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Decision Making”. Her areas of expertise include decision-support systems in urban planning, human-environment interaction, GIS, urban informatics and data analytics. By being the Principal Investigator of numerous large-scale European and national projects, she has gained vast experience with transdisciplinary research demonstrated by working with citizens, SMEs, NGOs and European cities (Eindhoven (NL), Helmond (NL), Bologna (IT), Lisbon (PT), Skopje (NMK)).

Gamze believes that in order to enable sustainable urban transformations, cities should be seen as socio-technical systems and therefore can be addressed with citizen-centered and data-driven approaches. At the intersection of complex interactions between citizens, technology and artifacts, she is passionate about integrating citizens in the decision-making process of urban transformations via digital tools and (big) data. Therefore, she

(i) develops digital tools (i.e. digital twins, web platforms, information dashboards) and citizen science methods for supporting public participation and citizen engagement in urban transformation processes,

(ii) performs urban (big) spatial data analytics within people as sensors concept (i.e. digital tracking, big data from sensory experiences) for understanding and predicting citizens’ behavior, opinions and experiences towards urban interventions and

(iii) researches the impact of digitalization on sustainable urban developments.

At TU/e, she is also involved in supervising PhD, PDEng, master and bachelor students in the field of urban informatics. She has been leading several education innovation projects during which she has developed online teaching materials (i.e. tutorials, quizzes, exercises, CANVAS add-ons) and included recent technologies (i.e. online mapping tools, GPS, drones, mobile phone apps) in curriculum activities. As a lecturer, she has extensive experience in coordinating and teaching courses such as Process Modeling and Information Management, Smart Cities, Geographic Modeling of the Built Environment, and Research & Development. She is also a regular guest lecturer at Istanbul Technical University.

Gamze has held numerous invited talks for various parties, including Berlin European House, ICOMOS, Smart to Future Cities Conference and Istanbul Technical University. She has also organized several webinars, workshops and conferences, and she holds editorial functions at several academic journals.

Geospatial data and tools are crucial to facilitate an agile ecosystem for the socio-technical processes in cities.